The following includes information that may be useful in understanding the present disclosure. It is not an admission that any of the information provided herein is prior art nor material to the presently described or claimed inventions, nor that any publication or document that is specifically or implicitly referenced is prior art.
In manufacturing and other industries Work In Progress (WIP) objects (parts, components, assemblies, documents, tools, fixtures, materials, waste products, programmable elements) need to be placed on racks, workstations or other places while they wait to be processed. A Manufacturing Execution System (MES) schedules work activities based on how long each process takes. If the WIP or other items are not found, companies typically have individuals or groups of individuals searching for the lost item as it needs to be processed in order to proceed to the next step of the overall process. If this item cannot be found in a certain amount of time, the company can suffer from late deliveries, work backlog and wasted time. In the worst cases, the item is marked as lost and a new order must be processed and prioritized which will impact the overall work schedule of the company due to this event being unexpected.
Discrete object tracking technologies commonly found in the known art are intended to provide position information of discrete objects in real-time within a certain range of accuracy. Common technologies used for discrete object tracking are: Global Positioning Systems (GPS), Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), Acoustic, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and Ultra-Wide Band (UWB). However, for all of these technologies, the location results are affected by the environment in which the system is installed. For example, metallic environments are known to affect the accuracy of discrete object tracking systems. Furthermore, people in near proximity of the wireless tag or wireless reader may also negatively impact the function of the wireless system due to the amount of water in the human body. Additionally, these systems also require having at least 2 readers present to collect data and they require sophisticated algorithms to calculate positioning. Generally, accuracy is limited within a 3-6 foot range for X-axis and Y-axis positioning, and Z-axis positioning requires a significant amount of readers present and even then positioning is not reliable.
As all the positioning data is determined by a snapshot in time based on data received at that time, all anomalies in the environment are present at that timestamp. This means that the positioning algorithms must be able to deal with anomalies and there are continual efforts to improve positioning algorithms to try to get more precise positioning data. However, all these systems will ultimately have precision errors due to the physics of a wireless wave propagation in open space and its interaction with the various materials in the physical environment. The inaccuracies of traditional systems make them unfeasible to provide discrete location of a discrete objects in discrete positions, such as a rack, workstation, closet, or any other locations that can have discrete positions and require discrete object tracking.
Additionally, another issue is cross-reads, where it is extremely difficult to distinguish if an object next to the antenna is read instead of the object in front of it when multiple objects are present.
Other proposed solutions include optically reading QR, Barcodes and Serial Numbers identifiers using cameras. However, optical identification presents its own issues, as it is expensive, needs line of sight and is impacted by environmental light intensity.
It is an object of the following to mitigate or obviate at least one of the foregoing disadvantages.